The present invention relates to a manufacturing execution system and, more specifically, to the versioning or revision control of the system database and electronic batch records.
Manufacturing execution systems, which control the manufacture of food products, pharmaceuticals, mechanical and electronic equipment, chemical compositions, etc., generally maintain a database of information which controls and supports the production process. These systems also record event data relating to particular events in the manufacturing process and support data.
The support data comprises numerous records, each of which having a plurality of fields in which data is stored. From time to time in such a system, it is necessary to revise the internal definitions that are used for the fields of the support data, although the external appearance to the user may be unchanged. Each time the internal definitions of data fields are changed, this results in a new version of the database.
In prior systems, if a change was made to information relating previous activities to the previous version of information, this event was recorded in a chronological log, and then the change was applied to the database causing a new modified version of the database to exist. Additionally, the state of the information database as it appears when the event occurs, if it was required to be available with associated events (such as production operation), would require storing the appearance of all pertinent data with the record, thus causing the environment to be stored with each record. This is cumbersome and impractical. Since pertinent data cannot always be identified at the time the event is stored, since after the fact auditing may require information that was not anticipated at the time of the first occurrence, all data might have to be stored or referenced at the time of storing, and a recreation of the database from this stored data would be required. This would be long and laborious.